Today I was planning on upgrading my work development machine to win 7, I already installed it at home and I like it much better than Vista.

So I have Vista x64 at work, the Dutch version. I have no idea why I ever chose the Dutch version for this machine but I did it and there is no turning back now. I made a mistake and I will have to suffer for it.

Because I decided to install the English version, which makes for easier googling if you ever get an error, Win7 decided that upgrading from Dutch to English is not an option (why oh why?). I really don’t understand that decision but I have to live with it.

So I had to take the route of the easy transfer wizard. I could have taken the vista transfer wizard but I’m not sure if that will work on win7 so I decided to take no chances and use the win7 easy transfer wizard. And I had to suffer some more.

The easy transfer wizard only works if the latest service pack is installed and the latests service pack only installs if the previous service pack is installed. The first thing the MS site says is to use the windows update thing. But that seemed to want me to download 1003Mb of updates neither of them service pack 2 or 1. So I decided to download SP1 and SP2 separately. SP1 being a mere 800 MB and SP2 a much smaller 500MB.

After downloading both, which goes pretty quickly on our new internet connection, installing SP1 and 2 took about 3 hours and that on a little beast of a machine.

So all that to be able to use the easy transfer wizard. BTW if someone tells me the vista easy transfer wizard just works on win7, I’m gonna scream (really loud too).

What a fun day.

And now of to the win7 setup.

Addendum: someone decided they should just trust users and don’t check if the target has enough diskspace on it to do the transfer. And I only have 85.5GB to backup anyway so why should they? On to the next attempt. I feel an addendum 2 will be needed.